Is the poem “Daddy” to be accepted as a kind of exorcism, a wild dramatic monologue of abuse screamed at a lost love?
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Her father died of a long illness, but there is no pity for his lost life. Instead he is not the dead one; he is the murderer:
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
The association of her own pain with that of the Jews in Europe has been named very well by George Steiner, “a subtle larceny.”
The father did not kill anyone and “the fat black heart” is really her own.
How is it possible to grieve for more than twenty years for one as evil and brutal as she asserts her father to have been? On the grounds of psychology every opposite can be made to fall neatly into place — that jagged, oddly shaped piece is truly part of a natural landscape if only you can find the spot where its cutting corners slip into the blue sky.
The acrimonious family — yes, any contrary can turn up there, logically as it were. But even strangers, the town, are brought into the punishment of her father and this is somehow the most biting and ungenerous thought of all:
There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.
She insists that she is the victim — poor and white, a Jew, with a pretty red heart. But she is a dangerous and vindictive casualty: “Herr God, Herr Lucifer/Beware/Beware.”
“Daddy,” with its hypnotic rhythms, its shameful harshness, is one of Sylvia Plath’s most popular and known works. You cannot read it without shivering. It is done, completed, perfected. All the hatred in our own hearts finds its evil unforgiving music there — the Queen of the Night.
Love for her children, what about that? Isn’t it mitigating? There is warmth and even joy. The boy and girl are “two roses,” a child’s smile is “found money,” children are “the one solid the spaces lean on,” the baby is a “high-riser, my little loaf.” But children also appear in the images of destruction.
In “Edge” the woman who is perfected by death has her dead children with her:
She has folded
Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden
Stiffens and odours bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.
A child’s smile is a “hook.” There is a poem about the deformities occasioned by thalidomide. In “Death & Co.”:
He tells me how sweet
The babies look in their hospital
Icebox, a simple
Frill at the neck,
Then the flutings of their Ionian
Death gowns,
Then two little feet.
What can we make of a poet so ambitious and vengeful, so brilliant and yet so willfully vulnerable? How can we judge such a sense of personal betrayal, such rage, and such deformed passions? Her work is overwhelming; it is quite literally irresistible. The daring, the skill, the severity. It shocks and thrills. She called – in a typically awful phrase — her last burst of poetry “the blood jet.”
When the time came she had earned it by all those earlier poems, slowly, carefully written, by that long ambition, burning, waiting, learning, by her A’s, her Phi Beta Kappa, her driven perfectionism, her arrogance, her madness controlled to just the right degree.
The loneliness which Alvarez so compellingly preserves for us, the freezing flat — without curtains – the icy early mornings, furiously writing before the children cried and before the “glassy music” of the milkman, her husband off with someone else — there we have a “modern instance” if there ever was one.
It is not a question in these last weeks of the conflict in a woman’s life between the claims of the feminine and the agonized work of art. Every artist is either a man or a woman and the struggle is pretty much the same for both.
All art that is not communal is, so to speak, made at home. Sylvia Plath was furious. Alvarez writes:
I suspect that finding herself alone again now, however temporarily and voluntarily, all the anguish she had experienced at her father’s death was reactivated: despite herself, she felt abandoned, injured, enraged and bereaved as purely and defenselessly as she had as a child twenty years before.
The sense of betrayal, even of hatred, did not leave her weak and complaining so much as determined and ambitious. Ambitious rage is all over Ariel and in the poems written at the same time and published in Winter Trees. “The Applicant” is a very bitter poem about the woman’s part in marriage. In “For a Fatherless Son” she speaks to the child about the absence of the father that will gradually grow in the child’s consciousness like a tree:
A death tree, color gone, an Australian gum tree —
Balding, gelded by lightening — an illusion,
And a sky like a pig’s backside, an utter lack of attention.
And that is what her own life was like at the end – the husband and father’s “utter lack of attention.”
In the explosive energy of her last months I see a determination to “win.” Indeed I feel, from the evidence of her work, that it is sentimental to keep insisting that the birth of her children unlocked her poetic powers. Why should that be? The birth of children opens up the energy for taking care of them and for loving them. The common observation that one must be prepared to put off other work for a few years is strongly founded. Of course, it is foolish to generalize and it is the work itself, its hard competitiveness that glare out at every turn. When she died she was alone, exhausted from writing, miserable — but triumphant too, achieved, defined and defiant.
The suicide of a young woman with the highest gifts is inevitably a circumstance of the most moving and dramatic sort. We cannot truly separate the work from the fascination and horror of the death.
It is a fact that the poems in Ariel were read, while Sylvia Plath was alive, with full self-control and detachment by editors, who then rejected many that have since become important additions to our literature. In the end this does not strike me as more than an astonishment and it is certain the poems would have been published. Everything, everything is published, and no matter that the claim upon our attention is more often than not unfathomable. What is more teasing to the mind and the imagination is how the poems of a dramatic suicide would read to us if the poet had held on to life, given interviews, public readings, finished a second novel, more poems.
It is interesting to make the effort to read Sylvia Plath’s poems as if she were still alive. They are just as brilliant, just as much creations of genius, but they are obscured and altered. Blood, reds, the threats do not impress themselves so painfully upon us. “Cold blanks approach us:/They move in a hurry.” What is that? we wonder. Unhappiness, agitation, fear?
“Edge” seems to be a Greek heroine, Medea perhaps, once more. “Last Words,” a profoundly well-written poem:
I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus
With tigery stripes, and a face on it Round as the moon, to stare up.
A beautiful poem in which, as the textbooks might say, the poet imagines her own death and is buried in a tomb, like an ancient Babylonian goddess of love.
“The Detective,” a prophetic poem about a death (or is it a murder?) that imagines us as we have become – detectives, putting the pieces together, working on the case. “Make notes,” it says at the end.
Her poems have, read differently, the overcharged preoccupation with death and release found in religious poetry. For indeed she saw eternity the other night, also; she cries out “No end?” as Herbert does. But she was not religious; instead she is violently secular in her eternities, realistic about the life that slides from her side.
Suicide was not a necessity to the passion and brilliance of the poems; nevertheless the act is a key, central to the overwhelming burst of achievement. She lived on her poetry during the last months of her life. Great she knew it to be; we feel that. It had to be serious, final.
To imagine anyone’s taking his life as a way of completing, fulfilling, explaining the highest work of that life may appear impudent, insulting to death. And yet it is more thoughtful to believe that love, debts, ill health, revenge are greater values to the human soul than creative, artistic powers?
Artists have often been cruel to others for what they imagined to be advantages to their work. Cruelty to oneself, as the completion of creation, is far from unimaginable, especially to a spirit tempted throughout life to self-destruction.
If anything could have saved Sylvia Plath it would have been that she, in life, might have had the good fortune to know her own fulfillment, her hard, glittering achievement. In The Review, Douglas Dunn wrote about her:
“Sylvia Plath was one of the most remarkable talents in any art of the decade, if not of the century.” She has won the green cloth — no writer ever wanted it more. Or it would be more careful to say that she earned the green cloth and along with the first determination to be preeminent as a poet there came money and power, all by her own efforts. But it came too late, of course, and lesser spirits usurped the ground, began the sentimentalization of her own ungenerous nature and unrelenting anger.
Beyond the mesmerizing rhythms and sounds, the flow of brilliant, unforgettable images, the intensity — what does she say to her readers? Is it simple admiration for the daring, for going the whole way?
To her fascination with death and pain she brings a sense of combat and brute force new in women writers. She is vulnerable, yes, to father and husband, but that is not the end of it at all. I myself do not think her work comes out of the cold war, the extermination camps, or the anxious doldrums of the Eisenhower years. If anything, she seems to have jumped ahead of her dates and to have more in common with the years we have just gone through.
Her lack of conventional sentiment, her destructive contempt for her family, the failings in her marriage, the drifting, rootless rage, the peculiar homelessness, the fascination with sensation and the drug of death, the determination to try everything, knowing it would not really stop the suffering — no one went as far as she did in this.
There is nothing of the social revolutionary in her, but she is whirling about in the center of an overcharged, splitting air and she especially understands everything destructive and negative. What she did not share with the youth of the present is her intense and perfect artistry, her belief in it.
That religion she seemed to have got from some old Prussian root memory of hard work, rigor, self-command. She is a stranger, an alien. In spite of her sea imagery — and it is not particularly local but rather psychological – she is hard to connect with Massachusetts and New England. There is nothing Yankee in her. So “crossing the water” was easy – she was as alien to nostalgia and sentiment as she was to the country itself. A basic and fundamental displacement played its part.
Sylvia Plath has extraordinary descriptive powers; it is a correctness and accuracy that combine the look of things with their fearsome powers of menace. It is not close to the magnifying-glass descriptions in Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, that sense these two writers have of undertaking a sort of decoding, startling in the newness of what is seen.
When Elizabeth Bishop writes that the “donkey brays like a pump gone dry,” this is a perfectly recognizable and immensely gratifying gift of the sort we often get also in Sylvia Plath. But the detail in Elizabeth Bishop’s”The Fish” is of another kind:
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoi
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
Marianne Moore’s abstruse, peering investigations, her shining, gleaming mirror reflect – more than anything else – words. For instance,
“Smooth Gnarled Crape Myrtle” and its flowing compounds:
A brass-green bird with grass-n
throat smooth as a nut springs from twig to twig askew, copying the lese flower piece —business-like atom
in the stiff-leafed tree’s blue-
pink dregs — of wine pyramids
of mathematic
circularity; one of a
pair.
In Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop we are never far away from the comic spirit, from tolerance and wisdom – qualities alien to the angry illuminations of Ariel. But the tradition is also strong in Sylvia Plath – and taste, too, in the sense of craft utterly conquered and absorbed. Precision interests her, and she is immensely learned like the other two poets, never wishing to be a “natural” in any sense.
She has also the power of the visual, part of the preference for precision over rhetoric. Perhaps this greed for particulars is the true mark of the poetry of women in our time. In the end, what is overwhelming, new, original, in Sylvia Plath is the burning singularity of temperament, the exigent spirit clothed but not calmed by the purest understanding of the English poetic tradition.
Long after I had been reading her work I came across the recording of some of her poems she made in England not long before she died. I have never before learned anything from a poetry reading, unless the clothes, the beard, the girls, the poor or good condition of the poet can be considered a kind of knowledge. But I was taken aback by Sylvia Plath’s reading. It was not anything like I could have imagined. Not a trace of the modest, retreating, humorous Worcester, Massachusetts, of Elizabeth Bishop; nothing of the swallowed plain Pennsylvania of Marianne Moore.
Instead these bitter poems — “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” “The Applicant,” “Fever 103” — were “beautifully” read, projected in full-throated, plump, diction-perfect, Englishy, mesmerizing cadences, all round and rapid, and paced and spaced. Poor recessive Massachusetts had been erased. “I have done it again!” Clearly, perfectly, staring you down. She seemed to be standing at a banquet like Timon, crying, “Uncover, dogs, and lap!”
It is a tragic story, completely original and unexpected in its scenes and its themes. Ted Hughes, her husband, has a poem about wives:
Their brief
Goes straight up to heaven and nothing more is heard of it.
That was not true of Sylvia Plath, and since we now have no choice perhaps there is not need to weigh and to wonder whether her black brief was worth it.
hexafu 